Leslie Van Houten and The Manson Family

Leslie Van Houten

Leslie Van Houten was born in a Los Angeles suburb, Altadena, growing up in a middle class family on August 23, 1949. She had an older brother and an adopted brother and sister that were Korean. Her parents divorced at fourteen, and had a bout of drug use (Benzedrine, LSD, and hasish) the next year. The fact that she was from a broken home and came from a middle class family, made her a perfect fit as a woman being a part of the Manson family.

Van Houten was part of a commune for a few months in 1968, at the age of nineteen, with two women and a man that broke up in the summer. She followed one of the women, Catherine Share, to Charles Manson's commune. Manson's ideas at this time were like the cultural utopianism that was circulating through the hippies at the time. They did not work, but rather freeloaded and ate out of garbage bins (which is a form of environmentalism).

While living with Manson, everything was controlled by Manson. Having sex, eating, drug use, and sleeping. They did not have the ability to wash themselves or their clothes. His was the only opinion they would hear while they stayed at a very isolated ranch (the Spahn Ranch) that was formerly used as a movie set for western movies. Whenever meals were eaten, he would lecture them constantly about his different ideas of acceptance and free love (traditional hippie ideas at the time).

By 1969, Manson's former message of peace and love would change to violence and revolution. And all they would do is listen to the White Album by the Beatles and read the Book of Revolutions. His bizarre plan to start a race war included killing Sharon Tate and all the people that were living in the house with her. Van Houten was not involved in these killings directly.

Leslie Van Houten took part in killing Rosemary and Leno LaBianca; she asked to take part in this killing after feeling left out of the killing of Sharon Tate. Sixteen of the 42 stab wounds that Rosemary had inflicted upon her were done by Leslie. Most of the stab wounds that Rosemary suffered were after she had died.

Van Houten is the woman responsible for telling the police the bulk of the information that they were able to gather on all of the killings. She told them things like who was present and took part in the Tate and LaBianca killings, as well as who showed up to the crime scene but did not take an active part in killing anyone. Through this testimony, the police were able to figure that Linda Kasabian was a crucial witness, due to the fact that she waited outside at the Tate murders and went to the LaBianca house with Steve Grogan, Susan Atkins, Manson, and Watson. She did not kill anyone, but would serve as a key witness for the prosecution.

At trial, Van Houten would fire three different lawyers on the grounds that she refused to say that her involvement with the LaBianca murders was due to Manson's hold over her. During trial, she did not seem to take the trial very seriously and would be heard giggling while people would be giving testimony. She said that she was given LSD before trial. No verdict was found. 

Van Houten was granted two re-trials. The first of which was granted because of a failure to call a mistrial after Van Houten's lawyer had passed away. Her new defense council would argue that her ability to think rationally was diminished due to her use of LSD and the influence that Manson had over her.

At her second re-trail, the prosecution added robbery to the charges to try to undermine her diminished mental capacity defense with the help of the felony murder rule. She was on bond before being found guilty and sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.

In 1971, Van Houten was found guilty and given the death penalty, but the next year, California would ban the death penalty and commute all people given death penalties to life in prison. At the age of 19, she was the youngest member of the Family to be convicted and also the youngest in the state of California to be given the death penalty. She's been in prison for over forty years and had twenty parole hearings; she is still in prison. At one of these hearings, Barbara Hoyt said that Van Houten was considered a leader in the Manson family. Since being in prison, she has gotten two degrees and helps elderly inmates.